


what the snowman learned about love

by CanvasConstellations



Category: Lunar Chronicles - Marissa Meyer
Genre: F/M, tlcshipweeks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 04:40:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5695153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CanvasConstellations/pseuds/CanvasConstellations
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's a verse waiting to be inked on the dip of her waist. He has kindness and conviction and a weight on his shoulders that's the size of a crown. Selene looks at him and wants to wrap her arms around him and place feather soft kisses on his pulse. Cinder looks at him and wants to run before she can spill any of her secrets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what the snowman learned about love

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
>   
> 
> 
> **For TLC Ship Weeks, mini ship week.**  
>  Theme: Espionage 

_(how the heart bends)_

Being the lost princess is exhausting.

Selene is graceful, soft, harmless. A little helpless. She's clean, if a little broken. She's the beautiful sort of damaged—the sort you romanticize. She's pastel colours and wind-chime laughter.

Cinder is a mechanic. She's dirt, grease, and 36.28% not human. She's dry humour and hurt in her lungs. She's red and brown and grey all pressed together. She's the orange of her lie detector. She's dust and secrets.

 

If Selene had a tattoo, it would be a poem on her skin. All Cinder has is bruises under her clothes.

She's been in New Beijing Palace for a month now. She walks the hallways with a straight back and an entourage during the day—Princess Selene. She smiles with lipstick to match her dress. Cinder only roams in the moonlight, whispering with the shadows.

There are eyes everywhere. In every corner. There are ears that do not belong. Little bugs that stick on so easily when she leaves them under lamps and under desks, that relay their information to a satellite far, far away, where someone relays everything back to the queen, her queen. She's become surprisingly good at this.

Being a spy is almost natural.

 

And it would have been easy too, if not for _him._

The young emperor. Kaito. Kai. He knows something. Cinder can tell. Selene could probably tell too. There's something off about him. Something electric that makes her bones hum, and her silicone systems want to blush.

He makes Cinder's fingers twitch, he makes Selene stutter. He has this smile...charm and amusement tugging at his lips. He makes her lose her footing and fall as ungracefully as a mechanic pretending to be a princess could ever fall. He apologises with warm eyes and soft fingers winding through her cold, metal ones.

She tells the queen. She's not compromised yet, but she might be soon enough.

Selene's aunt only laughs.

 

When _he_ laughs, Cinder can feel it ghosting against her spine. Selene's poem would probably have been about him. He's a verse waiting to be inked on the dip of her waist. He has kindness and conviction and such dreams of peace—silly things that lie on his eyelashes. He has a weight on his shoulders that's the size of a crown. Selene looks at him and wants to wrap her arms around him and place feather soft kisses on his pulse. Cinder looks at him and wants to run before she can spill any of her secrets.

She looks at him and wants to run before she starts a revolution for him.

Selene detaches a shimmery opaque device from behind a painting of the sky. It's about the size of her fingernail, thin, sleek. Cinder toys with it for six point two seconds before she crushes it under her boot. There are twenty-six more devices like these all over the palace.

 

He kisses her in the garden where there're only flowers and the cherry trees listening in. He traces a song in her mouth that tastes like summer. His hair is as soft as his words. His hands are as deft as his mind. He steals her breath, and leaves something warm and pulsing in her veins that races to reach her heart.

It feels like a glitch, a virus ready to corrupt her systems.

It feels like—

 

Cinder detaches something opaque and shimmery from under a table.

There's a poem under her fingernails.


End file.
